Nature abhors a vacuum. So does my cat.

Stasis

Welcome to Vacuum

In the
latest issue:
"When you get distracted, as you eventually will be, be distracted with a
purpose. If you are scatterbrained at times by nature take glory in it
and make the odd connections that no one else will. No one else thinks
the way you do and no one else has your unique combinations of skills and
experiences."

In an
earlier issue:
creative problem solving, networking vs. cronyism, how weird Silicon
Valley is. More issues are also online.
Join the mailing list
to get new issues as they come out.

What we're listening to

Deb is reading for
Assistive Media,
a non-profit that does an audio magazine delivered with RealAudio
every month via the net. They just won the Real Networks
Streamers award for best use of streaming media by a non-profit.
Congratulations!

Accordion Tribe
by Guy Klucevsek (United States), Maria Kalaniemi (Finland), Bratko Bibic (Slovenia), Lars Hollmer
(Sweden), and Otto Lechner (Austria). Live recordings from a three week
accordion group tour of Europe - lots of energy, and you don't find
too many works scored for accordion quintet (more's the pity). Amazon
has some 30 second clips online.

Left side / right side

What we're looking for

A local (Ann Arbor) printer that will do good color postcards
in small runs for not a lot of money. Or black and white, or
single color.

What we found

Writing paper made from recycled geo survey maps is called
"Geolopes" or "Topolopes", available from a number of suppliers.

Dynamic revision

2 September 1999

Will auctions at
eBay
ever be regulated? The latest item to go on sale is a
human kidney.

31 August 1999

While I wasn't watching,
GoGaGa Radio
got assimilated somehow into the
MacroRadio-Dot-Net
Internet Radio Network. I'm grooving a little bit better
since my main net radio listening machine got upgraded,
more processor and more memory seems to help. On right
this instant: Music For Cubicles.

New Media Magazine
article on the
Six Degrees
twist on e-commerce:
a "service finder" directory that lets you look for
house painters or dog walkers through recommendations
by friends or friends-of-friends etc. (thanks
brig
for pointing out the site.)

29 August 1999

I've started to use the new web log tool
Blogger
from the good people at
Pyra
to keep a
book log.
This is separate from the
books page
which has tidy links of books I like;
the book log may include stinkers or stuff that
hasn't been looked at yet.
Why Blogger? Tools are good.

25 August 1999

Phil Agre
, who runs the
Red Rock Eater news service, has
printed a very long and interesting
reading list
of books he is interested in (though he counsels that
he hasn't actually seen all the books so he's not
necessarily recommending them).

24 August 1999

A new issue of Vacuum is out (issue 29, if you're counting). I'm printing comments from
a couple of readers from earlier postings about getting organized
and the relative merits of paper for communications and creative work.

Subscriber
Paola Kathuria
has a site with some catchy graphics and quite interesting
writing. thanks Lindsay

17 August 1999

Bruce Peninsula Cottage Rentals
has 80+ cottages in Ontario available for weekly rentals. Nice part
of Canada to take a vacation in, good sandy beaches at Sauble Beach,
not too crowded. We took books along and did a lot of reading and no
computing.

Valdis Krebs latest piece on
"Working in the Connected World"
addresses human resources professionals and looks at recent research
in how people communicate with each other through social networks.

5 August 1999

The Dead Media Project,
chronicling obsolete devices for communications of all kinds,
organized by Bruce Sterling.

Trellix, a tool for editing
web pages and paper documents at the same time. I tried out an
earlier version, liked it, but had a hard time convincing anyone
else of its utility; there's a distinct tempation to try converting
Vacuum's weblog production to it so that I can more easily cut and
paste and spend less time in 'vi'. thanks Ken Latta

2 August 1999

For a couple of days I'm going to try our the Yahoo Messenger,
which has been in the news ever since it has been trying to
become compatible with AOL IM. I'm 'evielmet' on that system.

Randy Katz is a reasearcher
involved in the development of mobile computing environments, including the UC
Berkeley Ninja and Proactive Networks projects and the DARPA funded SmartSpaces
project. Ken Latta happened to run accross his
reading list.

From a 1996 First Monday:
John Seely Brown (Chief Scientist, Xerox PARC, and a U of Michigan Ph.D.) and
Paul Duguid
on
The Social Life of Documents.
"If the utility of both the fixed and the fluid is recognized, the Web may develop much of its innovative power from the possibility of producing documents that combine both fixity and fluidity. Already, many documents retain a constant text while their links are continually changed. As the social roles of continuity and change, of areas of stasis and areas open to dynamic revision, are better understood, social institutions may develop around this joint capacity in intriguing ways..."

25 July 1999

New from
Assistive Media
this month includes a reading of "Pick Your Part", an
Atlantic Monthly piece on looking for auto parts in a junkyard
in L.A. read by Vacuum reader (and chief knitting expert)
Deborah Fisch.

15 July 1999

In the Ann Arbor coffee shops is this month's Agenda magazine,
providing
"Alternative goals, entertainment, news and deeds around Ann Arbor".
Highlights: "How to be a progressive libertarian"; "Lessons - and
Hope - from Kerala" (a poor but healthy state in S. India); news
on the Living Wage ordinance in Ypsilanti and the affordable housing
crisis in Ann Arbor; a piece on Ozone House, a local shelter for runaway
teenagers; an upcoming 24 July "Frank-fest" featuring the songs of
Frank Allison of Odd Sox fame at the Gypsy Cafe; pictures of anti-war
rallies in Washington DC; and a Chiapas diary and account of a visit
to that area of Mexico by a local group. Plus events calendars and
local ads. Email: editors@agenda2.org.
Subscriptions $15/yr US to Agenda Publications LLC, PMB #542,
528 S State St. Ann Arbor MI 48104.

7 July 1999

An
interview with Jeff Hawkins, creator of the Palm Pilot,
is in the July/Aug Technology Review. It's about his theories
of how the brain works with "autoassociative memories".
thanks goCreate

Despite the infrequent updates (or perhaps because of them),
Vacuum is now on Lindsay Marshall's
The Weblog Menace
web ring at
Nibelung. This didn't require any work on my part.
Use the ring to find other similar sites. Groovy!

4 July 1999

Wow, long time between updates.

Melissa Giovagnoli has a forthcoming book on "Networlding",
how to grow a business in the new networked society.
There's a little discussion group going (using webboard)
at
Knowledge Circles.

The Ann Arbor Observer writes in its food column (I think that's
where I read it) that Zingerman's Practical Produce in Kerrytown
now has green tea ice cream. Yum. Heading there soon.

17 June 1999

The econ degree that took me many years to get didn't really
prepare me for the economy I landed in. One of the key principles
drilled in from an early start is the principle of decreasing
marginal returns, the core idea that eventually as you add
resources to a task you start to have less of an impact beyond
a certain point for an equivalent amount of work. A book that
challenges this assumption through a series of papers is
W. Brian Arthur's
Increasing Returns and Path Dependence in the Economy.
The
author's web site has several of the papers on line.
Now to track down a copy.
(thanks memepool)

11 June 1999

The Crazy Wisdom bookstore in Ann Arbor, which just moved to
the block of S. Main between Huron and Washington, publishes
a periodic local calendar of events. I don't think they're
on line in any form (just as well, it would distract from the
ambiance of the real store). A special treat is the tea shop
upstairs.

One item featured in the calendar is the workshop
Building a Business the Zen Way by Geri Larkin.
She has a book
Building a Business the Buddhist Way which I presume covers the
similar material. Hoping to pick up a copy to read.

10 June 1999

Sorry for the slow updates; I've been travelling to meetings that
are full of discussions that are not intended to be of general
interest to the public. Makes it hard to keep my mind full of
interesting stuff.

Book log update -
not many changes from last week. I'm off to New Orleans next
week, for which the best reading is the long out of print
New Orleans Underground Gourmet, quite possibly one of the
funniest books of restaurant reviews that you'll ever read.
A couple of cheap copies are on sale at
Bibliofind.

3 June 1999

Top of this weeks'
book log
is Christoper Alexander's
A Pattern Language.
If you liked that, you should be sure to also know
about the book
The Timeless Way of Building,
and a set of pages edited by Nikos Salingaros
on
Some notes on Christopher Alexander.
This points at a hopeful soon arrival of a new magnum opus,
_The nature of order_, which Salingaros is helping with editing.

2 June 1999

Assistive Media
is out with a June issue, including a George Lucas interview
and a story on the Icelandic DNA database.

30 May 1999

25 May 1999

Here's this week's Amazon report as a
book log;
it's kind of dry without commentary. Write to me if
you'd like to share the work of writing scripts to
turn Amazon weekly affiliate reports into useful,
usable pages.

24 May 1999

21 May 1999

Two recent issues of Vacuum discuss the state of the virtual community.
A piece from
Braddlee
describes the dispersion of the community he studied for
his Ph. D. work, coming back years later as the net has
grown and noting

What I had hoped for (along with other cyberoptimists, like Howard
Rheingold) was that as the net expanded, the opportunity for everyone to
find and form social ties related to interests that might not be
fulfilled (or simply expanded beyond) local place community would be
deepened. Instead, on most days we seem to be heading in a direction
that's about a mile wide, and a molecule deep.

A followup from
Ross Stapleton-Gray
riffs on the metaphor of the growing net as a rising ocean swamping
the islands of civility:

One that leapt to mind
was of the interplay between the water and the land as the
watertable rises: when "the Net" began, as a hodgepodge of different
systems, from ARPANET, to the WELL, to the Cleveland FreeNet (man, that
brings back memories....)
In those days, each pool was separated by the land, and, consequently, an
insular community. The pools differed considerably, though each was
populated by comparable types of creatures--they all thrived in small,
techie-flavored pools. (This is why, as a former Sovietologist, former
intelligence analyst, former Michigander, I don't feel all that unlike the
folks I know from the WELL, many of whom are granola-crunching,
sandal-wearing Bay Areans.)

In response to my complaint about not getting timely markup of ASCII
Vacuum emails into HTML Vacuum archives, Chris Locke notes that he
converted his
letters to EGR into HTML using
a cool little thing called
ASCtoHTML
from John A Fotheringham. Chris writes
"it's got lotsa switches so you can customize things quite a bit. I found it
very useful at least as a first-pass for markup. it does get the URLs right."
this site has moved, see
www.jafsoft.com instead

On 22 May (this Saturday):
6-8 p.m. "Spring Woodland and Wildflower Walk" : Leslie Science Center
(Ann Arbor Parks Department). Naturalist Carol Clements leads a hike
through Gallup Park to point out its trees and flowers and discuss some of
the folklore associated with them. Refreshments. Gallup Park meeting room,
3000 Fuller Rd. (west side of Huron Pkwy.). $2. 662-7802. Bring
a copy of
Michigan Wildflowers in Color by Harry Lund
with you as a reference.

16 May 1999

Phil Agre's
Networking on the Network,
noted by
Jeff Ubois:
"The first thing to realize is that Internet-world is part of reality. The people you correspond with on the network are real people
with lives and careers and habits and feelings of their own. Things you say on the net can make you friends or enemies, famous
or notorious, included or ostracized. You need to take the electronic part of your life seriously. In particular, you need to think
about and consciously choose how you wish to use the network."